Im almost 100% positive you can create fonts in Illustrator … whether or not there are more steps to take after the visual protion is complete is a mystery to me.

http://www.cool-fonts.com/html/howto.htm
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/makefonts/How_to_Make_Fonts_Tutorials_to_Create_Fonts.htm
http://desktoppub.about.com/library/rev/aafpr-atm41.htm
I hope one of these helps you out a little.but i think you’ve probably already read them.

I’ve created fonts in Illustrator…well actually I’ve modified fonts into my own now that I think about it. But I think I remember that you can do it somehow….

this was unhelpful, my apologies.

I haven’t used this myself, but it would probably be a good thing to try before shelling out for fontographer.

font forge

I’ve got three fonts in the works at the moment two serif classic faces and a Art Nouveauish style face. This is how I do my process. I take a fairly simple typeface (ie Myriad, helvetica or some other sans typeface) and print it out on a large sheet, I then use the chosen face as a base to build my typeface up from by using tracing paper (keep in mind this is the first step) Once I do few renderings I scan the sketched typeface. Then Bring it into Illustrator and trace the entire typeface doing any changes that are needed, and then I use Fontlab Studio 5 and copy/paste the vector letters into Fontlab, at which point you do all your x-height, baseline and kerning table work. Then you save to opentype format. Thats roughly my process. Keep in mind that most typefaces take months to years to develop and consist of literally 1000’s of characters. Let me know if you have any questions,

Cheers

check out dafont.com Under “Tools” they have a list of a bunch of different apps in which to not only create your own fonts, but also manage whatever fonts you have on your comp easily!

http://www.dafont.com/soft.php

You can probably find a free font building software online. Just make the font in illustrator

Everyone used Fontographer about 10 years ago. FontLab is the programme du jour right now. It’s far superior to Fontographer and it has full support for Opentype scripting.

Illustrator can’t make fonts, however, you can do the outlines in Illustrator. Fonts are built in a square; the emsquare or UPM. The basic size for Postscript is 1000×1000 units. In illustrator create a document that is 1000×1000 points—or 2048×2048 or 4096×4096, depending on what resolution you decide you need for the font. 1000×1000 is great for pretty much everything except when you want to include complicated dingbats or other graphics in a font—and set Illustrator to snap to grid. If you use 1000×1000 points set your grid to 10 points and your subdivisions at 10.

The top of the box is your cap height/ascender height, the bottom is your descender limit, and somewhere in the middle will be your x-height and base line. Set your origin at your base line. In FontLab you’ll want to set your UPM size and then add in your heights starting from the origin, ie: from the bottom of your document your baseline is 300 points up, so your descender height will be -300 in FL, and your cap or ascender height will be 700 and your x height will be, say, 400.

When you draw your glyphs in Illustrator give them a stroke or a fill when you’re done otherwise FL won’t recognise them when you copy them in. When I draw in Illustrator I use the art box as a guide and just draw the rest of the glyphs where ever I find space for them on the art board…it makes comparing glyphs much easier, but pasting into FL is a pain—though a lot less painful than making 600 separate AI files with a different glyph in each.

Once everything is drawn and pasted into FL you’ll want to go through each glyph and make sure they’re okay. For some reason all my glyphs paste in as open paths so I have to use FL’s close open contours tool on every single glyph. Also FL likes to add extra points—sometimes directly on top of an existing point!—so you have to keep an eye out for that too.

After that’s done constructing the actual font isn’t too hard. Pretty much all of the international characters are automatically generated by FL as long as the basic glyphs are in—accents by themselves and the dotless i and j, etc. Creating Opentype features can get a little time consuming but it’s not too bad. The hardest parts are adjusting the sidebearings and the kerning to make a well spaced font…aside from drawing the glyphs, kerning is probably the most time consuming part of doing a font.

And this came out way longer than I thought it would.

Illustrators the best in my opinion, it really depends on what your hoping on making, but if your making simple, elegant awesome fonts that people could use in books, I’d definitely reccomend illustrator!! also, if you want to make title fonts and stuff like that, use Flash or PS and export them into Illustrator

Echoing a lot of people, I started with Illustrator as my primary creating and editing tool. Fontographer, or any other such program, seems to be most useful in standardizing the design and then doing the algorithmic footwork to make the font functional.

before worrying about making fonts I’d probably spend a while with a pencil, pen, and tracing paper working everything out by hand first, beware the glowing box, it sux out your creativity.

The minimum basics of fonts:

TrueType and OpenType are essentially the same. There are however some differences that can be significant when changing platforms and OSs. They use an outline of the glyph and draw the ligature based on the outline and the “hinting”. The important thing with these fonts is the outline and how the points of the outline are expanded or contracted for the various font sizes.

There are also font types that use a single line at the center of the stroke to create the character.

If you google creating fonts you will get a lot of other peoeples opinions on how to do it (quite a bit of it is actually useful).

Good luck =)

personally i don’t know how, but Tracy over at lackadaisy made her font from her hand writing, she might be able to tell you what she did, or what program[s] she used, if the other comments here aren’t helpful. http://lackadaisy.com

My brother is huge into fonts. Graphic design major, now owns a design firm that actually created a font for Qualcomm. He and his partners also run a community site dedicated to fonts and typography:
http://www.typophile.com/

Anyone mention FontForge yet? I’m too lazy to read back.

I tried to find a font editing program and ended up with one called “FontCreator.” The pay version is about 70 bucks but the free demo seems to have all the necessary features including font installation. http://www.high-logic.com/fontcreator.html

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